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Hard and soft paternalism Samuel Brittan: Top Management Programme 29/03/07 The invitation asks me to discuss how far the state should intervene by way of regulation in areas such as consumer choice, citing food labelling, obesity, smoking and junk food advertising. My initial reaction is that it should not; but if that is all I said you might feel you have not had your money's worth. Indeed rather than listening to me you would be better off reading or rereading a novel that appeared in the early 1930's - Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Four keynote statements Let me therefore put before you four keynote statements. The first and fundamental comes of course from John Stuart Mill's famous essay On Liberty, published in 1859. "The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self protection. The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant."He makes it very clear that he is talking about adults. The modifications which would apply in dealing with children would provide ample material for a separate seminar. It is also clear that Mill is talking about so-called negative freedom, that is freedom from rather than positive freedom, which is not freedom at all. My own experience is that if the recital of Mill's principle does not strike a sympathetic chord in the listener at an early stage, there is little hope. There are of course genuine difficulties. Every human action affects others in some degree. If someone is pushed off an elephant in India, the repercussions can stretch to the City of London. Mill tried to meet this objection by stating that the effects on others had to be direct and clearly visible. But this has not satisfied all others even of the same basic persuasion. Now that there is a picture of Adam Smith on new £20 notes, perhaps I can get away with mentioning F.A. Hayek, despite Lady Thatcher's well advertised admiration of him. His ideal was to minimise the amount of coercion in society. I am not going to entangle myself in futile attempts at a definition of coercion and get caught up in an endless chain of definitions. The attractive feature of Hayek's concept is that it so clearly a matter of degree. If the state imposes intrusive anti-smoking regulations, it does not mean that it has also to go on to a 1920's style Prohibition on the sale of alcoholic drink. Having got away with Hayek, I might risk as my third concept, one belonging to Milton Friedman. This is not a definition of freedom or a highbrow defence of it. But it is a market-based explanation of how a large degree of freedom can exist even where people do not have an instinctive belief in each other's right to freedom of action or speech. I might have no intrinsic belief in your right to propagate Communism; and you might not accept my desire to propagate anti-Darwinian creationism. But we are both better off with an implicit bargain to let each other be. Fourthly, and no doubt to some people's relief, I come to Lord Keynes. In a famous pamphlet based on a 1924 lecture, he made a distinction (originally derived from Bentham) between what he called the agenda and non-agenda of government (The End of Laissez Faire). The dividing line was between what people can do for themselves and what could best be accomplished via the state. He had no doubt that the frontier would shift with every generation. Let me be fair. Keynes was attempting in this lecture to persuade Liberals of pre-World War One vintage to accept more state intervention than some of them felt comfortable with. But the distinction remains a useful one if we are travelling in the other direction towards less government. My basic case against the present British Government, in both its Blair and Brown wings, is that it has no conception of a non-agenda, of an area into which government should not step. Arguments for freedom What are the arguments for personal freedom? Mill was obviously attached to freedom for its own sake; but he made strenuous efforts to show that freedom has utilitarian value. He placed great emphasis on freedom as the best means to discover new truths, to foster independence of character and variety of life styles. Part of his originality lay in his denying that there was one way of life style waiting to be discovered and insisting that different people could, would and should find fulfilment in different ways. Hayek's arguments are very similar: he places special emphasis on the role of freedom in uncovering new knowledge. Other people, especially from the business world, may embrace freedom for negative and pragmatic reasons. They have seen so many state projects, whether the Dome,the Olympic Games or the handling of the BSE crisis go haywire that they the have no confidence in the Government trying to regulate our diets, or telling us what kind of exercise to take. Arguments for freedom are, however, a risky business. The ultimate values embraced by the classical writers may be less appealing than the joy of liberty itself. A good performance of Beethoven's Fidelio may do more for the cause of freedom than any number of books on political philosophy. As Brian Barry once remarked, the case for freedom may lie at the confluence of several considerations. While some people value freedom for the material progress they think it brings, others will value it for its own sake, perhaps despite that progress. The "Nanny State" So far I have avoided that term of abuse called the Nanny State, partly because it so often a political slogan used against Labour Governments by politicians and commentators not always notable for their own libertarian instincts. But when it comes to the measures to ban smoking in "public places" I cannot think of a kinder label. Would Ministers prefer "Big Brother is watching you"? There may be a modicum of truth in the concept of passive smoking if non-smokers are herded together with heavy smokers in a crowded room. But this is at most a case for making non-smoking rooms available in restaurants, office buildings and so on. The building where I work has long been generally non-smoking but with a couple of rooms set aside where smokers can socialise. What is gained by forcing these people into the street, if they will be safe even there from the Calvinist enforcement officers. Last year the Government proposed a database on which every aspect of a child's life would be recorded, ranging from how many vegetables he or she eats, details of school performance and whether the parents are good role models. A wide variety of police, social workers, teachers and doctors will have access to this database. David Willetts has called it a plan for bar-coded babies. Please don't tell me that this is a rational response to highlighted cases of child deaths when local authorities failed in their duties. Predictably, Margaret Hodge has made a speech praising the "unsung virtues" of the nanny state. I cannot get worked up about her planned booklet on how to read a book to children or how to limit the amount of television they watch. But there is slippery slope from advice to attempted enforcement. Soft paternalism The discussion takes us to what is now often called "soft paternalism". This is where the state might give a strong lead but on a non-compulsory basis. The biggest example of opting out in the first half of the 20th Century was the trade union political levy, which in practice went almost always to the Labour Party. When Conservative Governments were in power trade unionists had to contract in to pay the levy. When Labour was in power members had to contract out on a secret ballot if they did not wish to pay it. One might think it should have made little difference. In fact it resulted in millions of subscriptions being lost or gained by Labour according to the system used. I believe there is to be contracting out for those not want wanting to join the National Pension Savings Scheme proposed by the present government. My first instinct is to accept contracting out as acceptable if there really is no coercion involved. There is also the unkind thought that people who cannot even be bothered to sign a piece of paper to preserve their freedom clearly do not value it. But on reflection I think that even soft paternalism should be very sparingly used. For one thing there is the problem of moral pressure. The effect that a decision to opt out of some government programme is available does not in itself secure complete privacy. I should imagine that in a miners' lodge in the 1920s, it would not be difficult to guess the identity of anyone brave enough to contract out of the political levy and then take appropriate measures, of which sending to Coventry would be the least draconian. Mill was especially strong on the role of public opinion in discouraging people from "doing their own thing", which in his day he thought was worse than any government sanctions. Moreover, if a sort of semi-compulsion spreads into dozens of areas of life, it would take a brave and diligent person to sign out of all them. The tail end of a government is not perhaps the best time to make this point, but it is easy to imagine a state of affairs in which it took real courage, plus a lot of diligence in finding the right forms to fill, to live a life of which Tony Blair's successor might not approve. So my more considered view is that soft paternalism is a great deal less bad than the hard variety but should be indulged in sparingly and with great care. Cost to public services There is one argument against free choice, which some liberals find difficult to answer, but I am afraid I do not. This relates to the cost to the public services and public purse of remedial action if people live in a non-approved way. I cannot do better than cite the stock examples of heavy smokers or obese people putting an extra strain on the health service. This means that either the better behaved tax payer has to fork out more or that, within a predetermined health budget, the quantity and quality of care are squeezed to the detriment of all the virtuous citizens who have played no part in bringing about the problem. This example brings out the fact that although the NHS is treated as a religion, there is an adverse side to the doctrine of no payment at the point of entry. In a purely private system those with unhealthy lifestyles know that they mighty have to pay more for medical treatment, and that in a free society is their own decision. But before the dirigistes cry out in triumph, it is worth pointing out some possible devices for tackling this problem within the NHS framework. The suggestion sometimes made that people such as heavy smokers be denied all treatment is cruel, totalitarian and disgusting. But what would be eminently fair is for such people to pay a surcharge to cover the extra cost of their treatment. Obviously there would have to be a standardised tariff; a surcharge could not be tailored to each individual's bad habits. It is surely worth adjusting the doctrine of free service for the sake of a little more real freedom. Let me give another example. Opponents of immigration who want to look respectable and pro Third World talk about the loss to their native countries of people coming to the West to take up professional appointments in medicine, law or anything else. The modicum of truth in this case is that some of the people concerned have had their education financed, sometimes up to undergraduate degree level, by their home country. If they had paid for their own education it would be completely their business where they chose to live and practice. The old Soviet Union, of all places, had a kind of solution. In its last few years many Jewish graduates were allowed to emigrate to Israel, but had to pay a tax to offset some of the resources that the state had expended on their education. This is one of the very few Soviet inventions which are worthy of emulation elsewhere. How to respond What can the conscientious public official do in the face of creeping authoritarianism? Open defiance of the government of a day is best left for extreme situations, but every good civil servant or corporate executive knows that there are more or less enthusiastic ways of following instructions. There is a full spectrum, ranging from the minimum one can get away with, to devising rules and regulations which out politicise the politicians. And do not tell me that governments have legitimate authority because of an election every four or five years, in which voters have to choose between two assortments of policies on all manner of subjects - if they even do that - and in which it is hardly rational to vote at all. There is another notion of Soviet origin worth study. That is internal exile. There were some dissidents who either openly defied the Soviet government, or tried to escape to the west. There were also, as in every society, thousands of careerists and opportunists who just did what they thought would get them promoted. But in between there were those who just switched off, who did the minimum necessary to retain their jobs, without enthusiasm or Stakhanovism, and maintained their personal doubts. I am not saying that Tony Blair has done anything in home policy that as yet justifies such extreme measures: but to say "I was just obeying orders" is no more excuse in a conventional democracy - or for that matter inside a capitalist corporation - than it was under Hitler or Stalin. There are many related issues with which I have not dealt. The disregard of our present government for traditional civil liberties is not exactly an exercise in telling consumers how to behave; but it comes from the same stable of unconsciously authoritarian thought which has no patience for traditional restraints on government activism whenever a politician sees a headline in some intervention - probably due to be reversed in a couple of years time by its sheer costliness and absurdity. I am not going to digress on whether the government wants more or fewer people in jail; but I think you know what I mean. In practice some of the most controversial areas lie in the situation of children and young people. You cannot give a child of five the same freedom to live his life as you would a company chairman or a 25-year-old stockbroker. But if you are serious about freedom, you cannot believe in a single cut off age - say 18 - below which you can be as dictatorial as you like. The difficulty is that children are not just the possessions of their parents. In most cases their parents will have a better idea of their interests than some government bureaucrat, but not inevitably so. Children need to be protected from abusive or negligent parents, or parents so selfish they would pull their children away from school were they allowed to do so. But it is when we reach the late teenagers that the problem is most acute. For here those concerned are certainly not children, but not quite adults either. The government idea of imposing some sort of compulsory so-called education up to the age of eighteen is not consistent with a free society, and one only hopes will be killed by its own absurdity. Absurdity is indeed a note on which I want to end. For it is the absurd nature of so many government initiatives and interventions that can and do discredit them, rather than any amount of political or economic theory. If people become sceptical of the nanny-state because it turns out to be a very bad nanny they may in time come to see the deeper reasons for erecting a barrier of non agenda beyond which the government will think many times before it penetrates. The fact that I am speaking to you shows that we have not yet travelled very far on the road to serfdom, but vigilance will always be required against those whose favourite pastime is telling others how to live. A much fuller account of the thinking behind this talk can be found in my book A Restatement of Economic Liberalism, Macmillan 1988. Relevant material is also to be found in Capitalism with a Human Face, Fontana 1996 and Against the Flow, Atlantic Books,2005. I have some spare copies of Capitalism with a Human Face. |
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